Quick Overview

The newest volume in our popular Conversations
series features Japanese architect Tadao Ando. One
of the most celebrated living architects, Ando is
best known for crafting serenely austere structures
that fuse Japanese building traditions with Western
modernism.

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Description

Tadao Ando Conversations with Students

The newest volume in our popular Conversations
series features Japanese architect Tadao Ando. One
of the most celebrated living architects, Ando is
best known for crafting serenely austere structures
that fuse Japanese building traditions with Western
modernism. His minimalist masterworks—geometric
forms clad in silky-smooth exposed concrete—are
suffused with natural light and set in perfect harmony
with the landscape. In these highlights from lectures
delivered at the University of Tokyo’s Graduate
School of Architecture, Ando candidly describes
his experiences as a largely self-taught practitioner,
tracing his development from an early interest in the
traditional building craft of his native Japan through
his political awakening in the turbulent 1960s to his
current stature as one of the world’s foremost architects.
In addition to exploring his aesthetic influences and
working process, Ando offers students a road map not
only for maintaining professional integrity, but also for
becoming effective agents of change in the world.

• This is the first of Ando’s writings to be translated
into English
• Includes a foreword by Ando written specifically for
this publication
• Ando is the only architect to have won the discipline’s
four most prestigious prizes: the Pritzker, Carlsberg,
Praemium Imperiale, and Kyoto Prizes
• Ando’s Tokyo Sky Tree tower, the tallest in the world,
is set to open in March 2012